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To a casual observer, Elaine Lustig Cohen seems to have led a succession of unconnected lives. Graphic designer in the 1950's and 60's. Abstract painter in the 70's and 80's. Co-manager of an antiquarian bookstore in the 70's and 80's. Photocollagist in the 90's.

But a closer look yields not so much a different picture as connecting dots that lend cohesion to her long career as an artist. Those dots include the soul of a Bauhaus devotee, the eye of a Constructivist and an unusually self-deprecating approach to photography. ''I'm not really a photographer,'' she said recently in her Manhattan town house. ''I'm not known as a photographer.'' Perhaps, she explained, she uses photographs with either a collage or a drawing because she doesn't print her own photographs.

In a sly comment on coy turn-of-the-century photographs of female nudes (backside only, please), Ms. Cohen adds windows with black panes on either side of an appropriated nude photograph. She juxtaposes both against medical-textbook color drawings of a woman's profile and a woman's torso from the waist to the top of her thighs. In a study of male muscularity and movement, she pairs details from her own photographs of statuary with segments from etchings of sinewed legs in motion. These and 28 other photocollages by Ms. Cohen can be seen in a show at the Julie Saul Gallery, at 560 Broadway, at Prince Street, in SoHo, through June 28.

Ms. Cohen's discovery of photography as a worthy component of her art is a recent one. Alvin Lustig, whom she married in 1948 when she was 21 and who steered her toward a career in graphic design when she was fresh out of art school, did not personally care for photography. ''He said, if you take a photograph, you don't see what you're looking at,'' she recalled.

In the 40's, Mr. Lustig was one of the innovative graphic designers who changed the way book jackets looked in the United States, replacing literal illustrations and standard typography with abstract elements and expressive typography. Still, Mr. Lustig used photographs on the book jackets he designed. Several were by his wife, including a photogram of glass beads. Mr. Lustig's photographic covers, Ms. Cohen said, were clearly influenced by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, whom he knew.

With a natural affinity for the Bauhaus and de Stijl esthetic, Elaine Lustig easily learned graphic design. When her husband, a diabetic, started to lose his sight in 1953, she executed what he wanted done. ''He came out of the Mondrian, Bauhaus, de Stijl era, in which you designed everything,'' she said. ''They had this incredible vision that design was going to change the world.''

After Mr. Lustig died in 1955, she continued the work of his design studio. She did museum catalogues, book jackets and architectural lettering for clients like Philip Johnson, the Jewish Museum, General Motors and Meridian Books, which was at the time owned by Arthur Cohen. By the end of 1955, she and Mr. Cohen were married. Ms. Cohen worked as a graphic artist out of the town house they shared. Many of her designs, a fair number of which included her photographs, have become classics; a selection was shown at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in 1995. But by the late 60's, Ms. Cohen started to tire of commercial graphic design and took up painting, something else Mr. Lustig had discouraged her from doing. She favored spare, abstract geometrics. ''It was close to the way I worked as a designer,'' she said. In 1979, she was the first woman to have a show at the Mary Boone Gallery in SoHo.

At the same time, Ms. Cohen and her husband, an avid book collector, managed Ex Libris, a nearby rare-art bookstore that they had founded in 1973 and that specialized in the European avant-garde. Ms. Cohen photographed the books featured in the Ex Libris catalogues, which she designed. She also mounted photography shows at the bookstore, and in 1977 was the first to offer the work of Tina Modotti.

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After Mr. Cohen's death in 1986, photography assumed a bigger role in Ms. Cohen's life. ''Right after Alvin died, I think, I bought a camera,'' she said. She took black and white pictures, mostly of landscapes and architectural sites, on all the trips she took. But when her attention turned to photocollages, she used other people's photographs before she thought of using her own.

On a trip to Vienna in 1987, she bought two photographs of nudes from the 20's. A year later, at a flea market, she found photographic postcards with writing across the front (early postcards devoted the reverse side to the recipient's address). ''I was so intrigued that somebody wrote on the postcards, and I decided to say something on them,'' she said, referring to the collages she created. ''So it was this dialogue between me and the postcards.''

The elegantly witty photocollages in her 1995 show, also at the Julie Saul Gallery, were a fluid blend of Constructivism, Cubism, Dada and Surrealism. Parts of vintage photographs or postcards were combined with printed ephemera like tickets and stamps, and Ms. Cohen linked them all with painted geometric elements. ''What I really liked,'' she said, ''was working with the body and contrasting and transforming it with all these other pieces of ephemera or paint.''

About that time, Ms. Cohen began to photograph photographs. ''I didn't want to work small, and so I started to rephotograph the photographs that I found. Sometimes I could find only photogravures that I liked. So I would have to rephotograph them.''

Reluctant to be dependent on found photographs, she began using her own pictures in her collages two years ago. ''I had an idea to do a collage and I started to look and then I realized I had all these wonderful images. Why didn't I use some of them? And then I started to go out and take some photographs, always black and white. I really love black and white photographs.''

Ms. Cohen is beginning to put her photographs at center stage. In a three-part ''Windows'' series that she hopes to develop into a new body of work, she has framed pictures of the gardens at the American Academy in Rome with simple ink line drawings. The images, which she took in 1992, are not only classically beautiful but also suffused with a magical glow.

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